There are many things I love in life. I love my friends. I love big asa foam cups full of iced- black tea in the morning. I love music, I love that the space bar will pause Youtube videos.  I love all of these things and never have to defend that. one thing I occasionally do find myself defending is my love of fantasy.

In a way I understand, on its surface, a genre packed to the gills with elves, dragons, and wizards — not exactly grown-up. For those not too proud to explore a work of fantasy and not too dense to look beneath its surface, the fantasy genre is a rich addition to the literary, film, and television canon because it explores very real human problems and desires by creating allegories through which to explore them.  My love for fantasy books started when I was a kid and when i picked up a small paperback book, Trey of Swords by Andre Norton. I use to have a copy, but I have since lost that copy and would love to find another copy. as a kid I was forced to read books. I hate nothing more than being force to read books. I want to do it on my own so I always picked short books. I became so enthralled with the book i read it several times over. I could relate to the characters and their struggles and I just wanted to keep cheering them on. It is a most basic human urge, the age-old, universal desire to overcome our limitations, to soar and to unlock hidden powers within us. in fantasy, things matter. People matter. Decisions matter. There’s a point to events. There’s a sort of beautiful order to things, and there’s the comforting knowledge that everything will be okay when the story ends. Sure, sometimes there are unhappy or tragic endings.

Fantasy can be so many things to so many different people.  Sometimes simple escapism, a release from the daily trudges of life. Sometimes it’s about an idea, pushing those ever buzzing questions of what if to new and thought-provoking limits.  Sometimes it’s about characters, about what people do in a situation beyond their control of imagination.  Sometimes it’s about the world we’re in, dressed up in another guise, sometimes it’s about a world that might be, sometimes about a world that was.  the stakes in a fantasy story are often the highest possible – the continuation or destruction of the whole world. Fantasy stories are painted on the broadest canvas – they are, or at least can be, epic in a way that no other genre can achieve. Hence, epic fantasy. And epic themes require epic stories, multiple volume stories that allow authors to build and describe worlds with a level of detail that makes them believable, immersive, and – if done well – ultimately makes the reader fall in love with them. Whatever you think of fantasy, there is usually something in it for everyone, and lots for me.